Adventures Among Books eBook

The young Stoddart’s two desires were poetry
and fishing. He began with poetry. “At
the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal
tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers
with which he worked, and with no meaner tool.
Every other dramatic form he despised.”
It is curious to think of the schoolboy, the born
Romanticist, labouring at these things, while Gerard
de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile Gautier,
and Petrus Borel were boys also—­boys of
the same ambitions, and with much the same romantic
tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love
besides the Muse. “With the spring and
the May fly, the dagger dipped in gore paled before
the supple rod, and the dainty midge.”
Finally, the rod and midge prevailed.

“Wee dour-looking hooks are
the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing.”

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing
ditties, he wrote and published the volume whose title-page
we have printed, “The Death Wake.”
The lad who drove home from an angling expedition
in a hearse had an odd way of combining his amusements.
He lived among poets and critics who were anglers—­Hogg,
the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line, they
say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey—­

“No fisher
But a well-wisher
To the game,”

as Scott has it—­these were his companions,
older or younger. None of these, certainly not
Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the
Romantic school, as illustrated by Keats and Shelley.
None of them probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval,
Borel, le lycanthrope, and the other boys in that
boyish movement of 1830. It was only Stoddart,
unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured
by his literary friends, who produced the one British
Romantic work of 1830. The title itself shows
that he was partly laughing at his own performance;
he has the mockery of Les Jeunes France in
him, as well as the wormy and obituary joys of La
Comedie de la Mort. The little book came
out, inspired by “all the poetasters.”
Christopher North wrote, four years later, in Blackwood’s
Magazine, a tardy review. He styled it “an
ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd
title, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style,
between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of
Barry Cornwall.” The book “fell dead
from the Press,” far more dead than “Omar
Khayyam.” Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss
Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the
flames. The “remainder,” the bulk
of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets,
and by him was deposited in a garret. The family
had a cook, one Betty, a descendant, perhaps, of “that
unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook of Mr. Warburton,
Somerset Herald,” who burned, among other quartos,
Shakespeare’s “Henry I.,” “Henry
II.,” and “King Stephen.” True
to her inherited instincts, Mr. Stoddart’s Betty,
slowly, relentlessly, through forty years, used “The
Death Wake” for the needs and processes of her
art. The whole of the edition, except probably
a few “presentation copies,” perished
in the kitchen. As for that fell cook, let us
hope that